Breakaway Discussion

[Jane n Mike]

I find myself disturbed by the suggestion by some in this thread that legal game strategies aimed at optimizing an alliance's score are somehow incompatible with the ideal of GP. Consider the strategy of a strong team scoring in the opposing alliance's goal to maximize their seeding points, or a weak team refusing to defend in order to maximize their share of the winning alliance's seeding points. Or to take a rather more extreme case, would there be any problem with two strong opposing alliances agreeing to engineer a high-scoring tie, under which each alliance would earn triple seeding points? This is clearly the strategy under which the two "opposing" alliances could jointly maximize their seeding points.

Fundamental to the entire purpose of incorporating a reward/penalty structure into the design of a game is the notion that such a structure should encourage behavior consistent with the goals of the game and deter behavior contrary to those goals. Why should we assume that strategies like those above are somehow inconsistent with the goals of the GDC, if in fact they are tactically sound?

I like this game very much, over all, and think the GDC has done a spectacular job at posing a range of interesting problems to solve. But if the rules have the effect of encouraging strategies that are incompatible with the objectives of FIRST, that is a deep failure of the design of the rules, not of the character of the teams that aspire to play as successfully as those rules allow.

Mike Dennis
Team 1719